by Anne Holt
Cato Hammer’s disappearance made things even worse. At first I didn’t think people would be particularly concerned. I mean, obviously they would react if they got to know the brutal truth about how he died. But so far no one knew, apart from the staff, Dr Streng, Geir Rugholmen, Adrian and me. The general unease over the fact that one person hadn’t turned up for breakfast was therefore striking. After all, Finse 1222 is a real old haunted house of a building, with lots of hidden nooks and crannies and narrow, forgotten corridors. Bearing in mind Cato Hammer’s theological flexibility, something he had constantly stressed in public, he could just as well still be lying in a warm, comfortable bed, which according to the Bible he shouldn’t be doing.
But then there was this woman. She was hysterical, to put it mildly. It was driving us all mad. Most people were already in a somewhat unstable frame of mind by the time the two lads hurtled down the stairs and into the lobby, both bawling at the same time.
‘He’s shooting! They’re shooting up there! On the top floor! They’ve got guns!’
Six or seven people were standing at the foot of the stairs; two of them were girls from the handball team. They started shrieking as if a boy had surprised them in the shower. From my position diagonally across the room with the long table between me and the stairs, I saw an elderly man give such a violent start that he threw a full cup of coffee up in the air. It rotated slowly on its way down to the floor. In his confusion the old man lost his balance. The bouncy dog got red hot coffee on its nose, and barked, howled and whimpered in turn as it zigzagged among all the people, searching for its owner. When the old man fell to the floor, the girls put their hands to their faces and took a deep breath before letting out an ear-splitting, atonal scream. Someone shouted for a doctor. The dog owner yelled imaginative curses at the lot of us before he finally managed to grab the dog; he clutched it to his chest and rushed into the men’s toilets. Roar Hanson, who for some reason was standing right in the corner behind the counter in the Millibar, where strictly speaking nobody was allowed except the staff, threw himself on the floor and disappeared from my view. I noticed that Veronica, Adrian’s black-clad friend, was standing on the same side of the bar. She started to laugh, a surprisingly hoarse, deep laugh that in no way matched the rest of her spindly figure. The Kurd also hurled himself down, but unlike the priest he was thinking of others, not himself. He lay down on top of his wife, covering her with his body. The movement was so quick that it must have been something he had been trained to do. A woman who had been sitting on her own knitting throughout the previous evening started sobbing loudly. The pink baby, whom I hadn’t seen since the accident, woke up and started yelling in her mother’s arms. The noise level in reception threatened to drown out the storm. Shouts about guns and shooting were still coming from the stairs. One of the businessmen – I thought I might have seen his photo in Dagens Næringlsiv but I couldn’t think of his name – quickly closed his laptop, wriggled out of the window seat and started to run towards St Paal’s Bar with the computer under his arm.
‘They’re going to shoot us!’ somebody bawled. ‘They’re on their way!’
The man increased his speed. Several people followed him. A four- or five-year-old boy with his mouth full of food and a roll in each hand was knocked over by a tall woman as she ran. I tried to move so that I could help the child, but I barely had time to release the brakes before Geir Rugholmen came racing out of the kitchen. He picked up the child and placed him on my knee in one smooth movement before climbing up onto the table, raising his arms in the air and bellowing:
‘Stop! Stop! Shut up, the lot of you!’
It was like flicking the switch on a circuit breaker.
Not only did everyone stop talking, but all the people who were running, pushing and waving their arms around froze like the players in a game of statues when the music stops.
Afterwards, I thought of that moment as a turning point. The atmosphere had shifted long ago. And yet it was only now that I really began to feel afraid. Not of the storm. Not of the murderer at liberty in our midst.
‘Right, listen to me!’
Geir was no longer bellowing. There was no need.
‘He’s dying!’ a feeble voice shouted from the stairs, at the far side of the lobby. ‘Elias is dying! Somebody help me!’
Geir gazed out across the room, at all the faces turned towards him. Before he found what he was looking for, Dr Streng and the female gynaecologist were hurrying across the floor in a slalom race between the motionless figures. The female doctor was the first to reach the man on the floor. She bent down, and I could no longer see her or her vertically challenged colleague.
The boy on my knee was weeping quietly.
‘Stay exactly where you are,’ hissed Geir Rugholmen. ‘Nobody is shooting. Do you hear me? Not one single shot has been fired, and not one single shot is going to be fired. Is everything OK over there?’
Nobody answered him. I could hear rhythmic counting from the other end of the reception area, and assumed that Elias’s tired heart had been unable to cope with so many exhausting experiences in less than twenty-four hours.
I heard cautious steps behind me, and half-turned around. It was the woman who had knocked over the little boy without stopping. She stood on the short staircase between St Paal’s Bar and reception, next to the businessman who had also come back, crestfallen and red-cheeked. Some of the others who had tried to flee from the imagined shooting drama were slowly moving closer. The woman was staring at me with eyes that reminded me of why I had begun to feel so afraid.
A sense of unease was spreading through the room. The counting stopped. I looked up at Geir, who could presumably see what was going on from his elevated position. He rubbed a hand over his eyes.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said the female doctor, far away.
The only sounds that could now be heard above the storm were the sobs of the little boy I was holding, and the weeping of the woman who had just become a widow.
The Finse disaster had just claimed its third victim.
The woman behind me came up to my chair, held out a thin, uncertain hand and said, ‘I’m sorry. You must forgive me!’
I didn’t look at her. Instead I met Geir Rugholmen’s gaze. He was still standing on the table, his legs wide apart; he was strong, but there was an air of resignation about him. We were both thinking the same thing.
The people who were snowed in at Finse 1222 had begun to let go of their dignity. And only eighteen hours had passed since the accident.
v
After Elias Grav’s ill-timed heart attack, people did at least seem to be trying to pull themselves together. The two young men who had started the whole thing by yelling about guns being fired seemed quite upset. Geir had not given up until they had loudly and clearly admitted that maybe there hadn’t been any shooting. But they had definitely seen guns! There was a man, or maybe even two, standing in the corridor outside the top floor apartments with an automatic weapon in his hands. They stuck to that, the boys, even if that business about the shooting might possibly have been cracking and banging caused by the storm. They might have misheard. They really didn’t mean to scare anyone, they said in their defence, but when the rumours started about the guards on the top floor, they felt they had the right to investigate the matter. Geir repeated his clear instruction: everyone was to respect the cordon he had set up in front of the door leading to the narrow corridor; Berit Tverre then took over and informed the assembled company that unfortunately Cato Hammer had passed away during the night. He had been carrying out a small errand down in the lobby at about three o’clock, and had fallen over. The cause of death was presumed to be a massive brain haemorrhage. Magnus Streng confirmed this, weighed down with seriousness, his hands joined together as if to show respect for the dead man’s profession.
‘And it’s almost true, after all,’ I said. ‘It certainly was a real bleed in the brain.’
Nobody cracked a smile.
&nb
sp; We were in the kitchen: Berit Tverre, Geir, Dr Streng and I. We couldn’t hear a sound from the lobby, and not only because of the noise from outside. The old man’s heart attack had been a shocking thing to witness. The widow’s lack of self-control hadn’t exactly improved the situation. People moved away in silent embarrassment, and when the sad explanation for Cato Hammer’s disappearance was delivered, most of those present had had more than enough. Some went back to their rooms. Others chose to stay in the communal areas without really knowing what to do. The continuation of the previous day’s bridge tournament had been postponed for the time being. Evidently playing cards was regarded as inappropriate under the present circumstances. It didn’t stop the gang of poker-playing teenagers, but at least they’d had the decency to withdraw down to Blåstuen. On the whole, people seemed to have swallowed Berit’s lie hook, line and sinker. However, I was still somewhat concerned about how the murderer might have reacted to the story. I had tried to look for any changes in facial expression as Berit was giving her little speech, but it was pointless to try to read anything from the small number of people I could see from the position I was in. If the perpetrator had actually been in the lobby when Cato Hammer’s death was announced, we could only hope that he or she accepted the incorrect cause of death as a temporary declaration of peace from the hotel management.
People must be kept calm at all costs.
Including the perpetrator.
‘Who’s actually up there on the top floor?’ I asked, looking from Geir Rugholmen to Berit Tverre. ‘I really do think I ought to be told at this point.’
They were spared the need to answer the question.
‘It’s rather difficult to prepare food for almost two hundred people when my kitchen has been converted into some kind of conference room,’ the chef interrupted us crossly.
He was surprisingly young, with a thin beard and short, spiky hair. Despite the cold draught coming from the broken window, he was wearing only a vest over his full-length apron. Both items of clothing were dazzling white and freshly ironed. He was chewing on a toothpick. Behind him stood two assistants, a woman and a man.
‘Could you at least move a bit further in? Over there?’
‘It’ll be a bit cramped,’ said Berit, shrugging her shoulders apologetically. ‘But I suppose we can ...’
She pulled two bar stools that had turned up during the morning towards a door I had never opened. I followed slowly, with Geir and Magnus Streng right behind me.
We were standing in a storeroom with three substantial doors on the right-hand side. Freezer, fridge, and another cool room.
‘This is where we have our deliveries,’ said Berit, banging a metal door with her hand. ‘As you can tell, the insulation in here isn’t much good. But we’ll just have to put up with it. We do have an office behind reception, with no steps,’ she nodded in my direction, ‘but I’ve got three men in there trying to keep in touch with the outside world. This is the only place on this floor where we can be left in peace, to a certain extent. Don’t worry about the kitchen staff. They’re concentrating on what they’re meant to be doing.’
‘I’m perfectly comfortable sitting here,’ I said.
Nobody thought that was funny either. Magnus Streng hopped up onto the high bar stool with surprising agility. Berit took the other. Geir Rugholmen leaned against the wall and folded his arms.
‘So,’ I said.
‘We don’t really know much,’ said Geir, scratching at his beard.
I waited in vain for him to continue. Berit and Geir looked enquiringly at each other, as if they hadn’t really decided who was going to speak.
‘When the train crashed,’ Berit began hesitantly, stopping to take a deep breath before going on. ‘When the train came off the rails and crashed, we heard it. In spite of the fact that by that stage the weather was already unpleasant, to say the least. The Red Cross people rushed over.’
I remembered somebody mentioned the Red Cross depot, a building attached to the wing of the hotel on the opposite side.
‘But the strange thing is,’ Berit said, taking her time. ‘The strange thing is that there was a phone call. It can’t have been more than two or three minutes after we heard the crash, and the telephone rang. At first I was intending to ignore it, I was convinced something serious had happened to the train and I really wanted to get the rescue operation under way. But somebody ...’
She shook her head, as if she were trying to come up with an explanation for her own behaviour.
‘I answered the phone.’
From the kitchen I could hear the clatter of pans and a whining noise that I took to be an electric meat saw. By now the draught from the door leading to the delivery area was so strong it felt like a breeze. I shivered.
‘Who was it?’ I asked, when nobody seemed keen to continue.
‘I don’t really know.’
‘Right. What did this person want?’
‘He ... It was a man. He mentioned a name, but I didn’t hear it properly. What I did grasp, however, was that he was from the police security service, PST. His voice was ... insistent, I’d say. Authoritative. As if he was totally used to giving orders. And everything happened really quickly.’
‘But what did he say?’ Magnus Streng asked impatiently. ‘What did the man whose name you can’t remember want, and what did you do?’
‘He said the last carriage had to be emptied first. They had their own snowmobile with them, he said, but they would need more than that. One more.’
‘Their own snowmobile? A snowmobile? On the train?’
Magnus Streng reminded me of a clown again, just when I had forgotten how funny he was.
‘Yes. It turned out to be true. Not one of the biggest, but big enough for a driver and one passenger to get here long before the others. Perhaps twenty minutes or so. But the strangest thing of all was that he knew where they were to go.’
‘Who?’ I said. ‘The man on the phone, or the one on the snowmobile?’
‘Both, actually. But I meant the man on the phone. “Put them in Trygve Norman’s apartment,” he said.’
Streng’s mouth fell open. I don’t suppose I looked all that much more composed. We looked at each other and closed our mouths simultaneously.
‘Yes.’
Berit raised her hands in a gesture that was half resigned, half eager.
‘That’s what he said! That’s exactly what he said. And Trygve’s apartment is indeed the one right at the top, furthest to the west. It’s the best apartment here at 1222, if we ignore the director’s residential quarters which are of course ...’
She shook her head and broke off.
‘It’s no secret that Trygve owns that apartment, on the contrary, he’s one of the driving forces when it comes to keeping this place going and ...’
Once again she stopped. Cleared her throat and went on:
‘But the whole situation left me so confused that I didn’t say a thing. And then ... then he gave me a mobile number. But that was only after he ...’
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. I could see the muscles in her cheeks twitching as she gritted her teeth. She was breathing deeply through her nose.
‘Everything’s fine,’ said Dr Streng, placing his chubby hand over hers.
She merely nodded. Then she swallowed once more.
‘We are not in a dangerous situation.’
‘The man on the phone,’ I reminded her. ‘First of all he did or said something. Then he gave you a telephone number.’
‘Yes. First of all he said it was extremely important that I did what he said. That the people in the last carriage must get here before everybody else. He did actually use the word “extremely”. Then he added that it was’ – she searched for the right words – ‘“a matter of national security”. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s what they say. If that was what he meant. And the number?’
‘I just had time to scribble it down. He s
aid I could call that number if I didn’t believe him. But that I would have to hurry, if that were the case.’
Suddenly she started rummaging in her trouser pockets. She couldn’t find what she was looking for on the right-hand side, but she pulled a folded scrap of paper out of the left-hand pocket.
‘I chose to believe him. I didn’t think I had any choice. So I never called the number. Instead I made sure they went straight up to the apartment as soon as they arrived. The first two, I mean. One of them spoke Norwegian. He was polite, but stressed. Or ... very snappy, somehow. The other one didn’t say anything. He was wearing so many clothes that I’m not even sure about the sex. But I think it was a man. He was ... big. Powerful, I think. But of course that could just be the clothes. Hat, hood, anorak, ski goggles ...’
I held my hand out for the piece of paper. She passed it over.
‘Did the number of the man who rang come up on the display?’ I asked her, looking at the eight numbers on the paper.
There was no area code.
‘No. It said number withheld. But he did give me that number.’
‘Do any of you have a phone like that?’ I asked without looking up from the piece of paper. ‘With a hidden number, I mean, so that you can’t see who’s calling?’
‘Here,’ said Magnus Streng, passing me his. ‘I’ve got two mobiles – one for work, and this one for family and other important people. It has a hidden number. Sometimes it’s nice not to be at everybody’s beck and call.’
He grinned broadly and said:
‘I expect it’s the same for all of us.’
Without replying I keyed in the number. It rang twice before someone answered. A man gave his name.
I was no longer aware of the storm or the penetrating racket from the three chefs in the kitchen. I could no longer feel the troublesome draught. On the contrary, a wave of warmth flooded through my body, I felt light-headed.